Three Of A Kind

Stephen 'Gatesy' Gates, Simon 'Yon' Hall and Scott 'Scod' Edgar are still the lovable geeks that you have always known, but the newest release from these guys moves slightly away from Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars humour and ghost pirates. Gatesy had a chat with us about the years that have passed and the year ahead, and they don't seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

The latest album, Men Of Substance, jumps into a new frontier of mature gags and themes of growing up. There are songs about doing your BAS, meeting spouses at Gay Bars and the world over the hill. “We have done the pastiche album with Middleborough Road, where we were like, that's the soul song, that's the heavy metal song and that's for the string quartet. In this album, while there are more bluesy songs, we wanted it to be the more authentic to what we sound like when we play them. With producer John Castle it was really organic and it was the first time we went into the studio in 17 years where we had no preconceived ideas.”

Music comedy albums are usually thrown in a weird category where all that is judged is humour, rather than musicality or ideas. Sometimes they don't even get assessed alongside other music albums. “We grew up on comedy albums that were very self-consciously comedy albums like Monty Python where they talk about 'this is the part of the album where we do this'. The usual expectation is a live album so the listening audience can hear the other audience laugh, but we wanted to make a musical album that's funny. It gives the listener the environment that they are the one person in the audience that this is for and makes the comedy more intimate.” 

One song, The Blueprint, got the guys noticed by the people at Save Live Australian Music (SLAM). The song looks at the suburbanisation of inner city suburbs and its effect on the music scene. “The story of the The Blueprint song is happening everywhere. I live in Fitzroy, Yon lives in St Kilda and we are all kind of affected by the 'flattage' that is erecting around our homes and overshadowing these small pubs. Wally (Gotye) came along to a show in Sydney and liked that song in particular and said, 'let's work on a song together'.” That song is a reinterpretation of The Reels classic, Quasimodo's Dream and it's being released as part of the pledge for SLAM. 

At the end of June, the guys will be playing a three-headed dragon in Malthouse's production of The Dragon by Evgeny Shwarz. “It's been great to not just be us three staring into the void, but to work with other actors and a production team working from the ground up on this old Russian play. After the reading we didn't want to leave; we were sitting around a table, talking about dragons, Lancelot and knights and shit. We looked at each other and thought, we get paid for this?”

WHO: Tripod
WHAT: Men Of Substance (Universal)